some vague, half-forgotten deity or
First Maker of things, a god decrepit from age or all but careless of
his children. Spirits were known and feared, but scarcely defined or
described. Sympathetic magic, and perhaps a little hypnotism, were all
their science. Kings and nations they knew not; they were wanderers,
houseless and homeless. Custom was king; yet custom was tenacious,
irresistible, and as complex in minute details as the etiquette of
Spanish kings, or the ritual of the Flamens of Rome. The archaic
intricacies and taboos of the customs and regulations of marriage might
puzzle a mathematician, and may, when unravelled, explain the less
complicated prohibitions of a totemism less antique. The people
themselves in their struggle for existence had developed great
ingenuities. They had the boomerang and the weet-weet, but not the bow;
the throwing stick, but not, of course, the sword; the message stick,
but no hieroglyphs; and their art was almost purely decorative, in
geometrical patterns, not representative. They deemed themselves akin
to all nature, and called cousins with rain and smoke, with clouds and
sky, as well as with beasts and trees. They were adroit hunters,
skilled trackers, born sportsmen; they now ride well, and, for savages,
play cricket fairly. But, being invaded by the practical emigrant or
the careless convict, the natives were not studied when in their prime,
and science began to examine them almost too late. We have the works of
Sir George Grey, the too brief pamphlet of Mr. Gideon Lang, the more
learned labours of Messrs. Fison and Howitt, and the collections of Mr.
Brough Smyth. The mysteries (Bora) of the natives, the initiatory
rites, a little of the magic, a great deal of the social customs are
known to us, and we have fragments of the myths. But, till Mrs. Langloh
Parker wrote this book, we had but few of the stories which Australian
natives tell by the camp-fire or in the gum-tree shade.

These, for the most part, are KINDER MARCHEN, though they include many
aetiological myths, explanatory of the markings and habits of animals,
the origin of constellations, and so forth. They are a savage edition
of the METAMORPHOSES, and few unbiased students now doubt that the
METAMORPHOSES are a very late and very artificial version of
traditional tales as savage in origin as those of the Noongahburrah. I
have read Mrs. Parker's collection with very great interest, with
"human pleasure," merely for